Since election day 2016, the controversy over alleged Russian meddling and Trump campaign collusion has consumed Washington and the media. Yet one year later there is still no concrete evidence to support it — let alone any evidence that a Russian intervention might have altered the election result.

US intelligence officials claim that the Russian government hacked emails and used social media to help elect Donald Trump, but there has yet to be any corroboration. Although the often-cited January 2017 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence ‘uses the strongest language and offers the most detailed assessment yet,’ The Atlantic observed, ‘it does not or cannot provide evidence for its assertions.’ Noting the ‘absence of any proof’ and ‘hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack,’ the New York Times concluded that the intelligence community’s message ‘essentially amounts to “trust us”.’ That remains the case today.

The same holds for ‘collusion’. Officials acknowledged to Reuters in May that ‘they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing or collusion between the campaign and Russia in the communications reviewed so far.’ Well-placed critics of Trump — including former DNI chief James Clapper, former CIA director Michael Morrell, Representative Maxine Waters and Senator Dianne Feinstein — concurred.

Recognising this absence of evidence helps examine what has been substituted in its place. Shattered, an insider account of the Clinton campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, reports that ‘in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss.’ A source recounted that aides were ordered ‘to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way.’ Within 24 hours of Clinton’s concession speech, campaign officials Robby Mook and John Podesta assembled her communications team ‘to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up... (...)

Aaron Maté is a host/producer for The Real News and a contributor to The Nation, where a shorter version of this article initially appeared.
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